Almost all the candidates in the French presidential election campaign, from the Far Right to the Radical Left, are championing protectionism, a rare issue on which there is such broad agreement. But it doesn’t impress World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy, who dismisses the protectionist vogue as one based on false premises and which only serves to divert attention from the primary issue of French competitiveness.
In this interview with Mediapart, Lamy, a former Eurpean Union trade commissioner and veteran member of the French Socialist Party, said the debate has a dimension that he calls "anthropolitical" – regarding the interrelationship between politics and the human condition – which is linked to the country’s presidential regime, a uniquely French approach. It also reflects long-standing unease over the European ideal.
Protectionist ideas are "very linked to French culture, to the country’s history and geographical situation and a particularly French conception of the relationship between politics and economics", Lamy told Mediapart.
They derive from a political system under which "a lord barters his protection in exchange for loyalty", Lamy said. He went on to compare the feudal system with the role of the present-day French president as a protector of the French people.
Institutionalising the role of protector to this degree is unique in Europe and is "very much in line with a profoundly pessimistic vision of France as an island of contentment surrounded by a world of adversity", said Lamy, a former European trade commissioner.
But while discussing protectionism is perfectly legitimate, the way the issue has been reduced to political spectacle in the election campaign has a damaging effect, he said. "It diverts attention from the essential problem, that of French competitiveness."
The issue of how to make France more competitive was addressed by French employers' and trade union organisations in a joint document published last June entitled 'An Approach to French Competitiveness' (Approche de la compétitivité française). Lamy said it was a shame the positions outlined in the document were not being used to feed the current debate.
The document was the fruit of collaborative work begun in December 2009. It begins with a common declaration entitled "Competitiveness: going beyond ideological approaches".
"Rather than give in to prevalent theories of decline we have chosen to identify a few priorities on which to build a collective plan for growth and progress in the years to come," the document said.
It listed innovation; optimising human input; benefiting fully from the EU; revitalising France’s existing entrepreneurial capacity; and obtaining financial relief for enterprise as well as public finances as the necessary priorities. "In other words, capitalising on our attributes and reinforcing them."
Lamy said the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism in France, which was not borne out in the joint document, was in itself a serious problem. "This way of representing things forms an obstacle to the necessary motivation of reforms."
Arguments for protectionism, he said, "are founded on premises that no one contests, even though they are mistaken". For example, it is simply not true that Europe is a victim of globalisation.
Europe, he said, has suffered less erosion of its trading position with globalisation than the United States or Japan. Over the past decade the EU’s trade surplus in manufactured goods has tripled to 194 billion dollars. Both the United States and Japan have lost six points of market share since 1995, to 12.5% for the U.S. and 8% for Japan, but Europe’s share (excluding energy) has only slipped 1.3 points to 19.4%, he said.
This conceals variations between countries, he noted. "With the same trade policy, the same external conditions and for some, the same currency, there are European countries which show a good performance while for others it is not as good."
Protectionist myths and anthropological truths
Another myth is that employment in Europe suffers because of social and environmental dumping. In fact, Lamy said, 75% of France’s trade is with other advanced countries like EU members, Switzerland or the United States.
Paradoxically, France is tending to lose market share where there is no social and environmental competition and gain share where such competition does exist.
The country’s trade balance with other European Union countries has tipped in their favour to the tune of 57 billion euros over the past ten years, while over that period its trade balance with countries outside the European Union has improved by 4 billion euros.
Besides, far from being open to all and sundry, the European market is in fact protected, for example by agricultural and food industry norms. "Not a single Brazilian chicken enters Europe without conforming to these standards," Lamy said. As a result, the Brazilian food processing industry has made massive investments to ensure it has the right level of conformity.
The real problem with France’s competitiveness is not the level of salaries and social security charges, as is often claimed, since hourly productivity is one of the highest in the world and largely compensates for these factors, Lamy asserts. "No, France’s main problem is what is called non-price competition," he said. This includes factors such as research and development, innovation, education and continuous training, the legal and regulatory environment for companies and product positioning on the value scale.
All these things go beyond a purely economic understanding of the crisis, whether for France or for Europe as a whole, he argues. This is why he is interested in anthropological considerations, as they have an effect on the functioning of world governance bodies like the WTO. "Why is it that, given the unity of market capitalism, different peoples have absorbed its anthropological premises more or less effectively?" Lamy asked. How, for example, have the Chinese or Indians taken the capitalist imperative of competition into their systems of government or their images of the world as part of a narrative of globalisation?
Held back by clichés and prejudices
For Europeans, the current crisis is a sudden reminder that it was a mistake "to have ignored the anthropological dimension of building Europe", according to Lamy, who was Jacques Delors' chief-of-staff when Delors was president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has laid bare both the advantages and the limits of European-style de-facto solidarity, Lamy said. "It created integration but without offering the peoples of Europe representation or a narrative of their common destiny."
"We accept common governance because it gives us the feeling of belonging to a community that needs such governance," he added. But national communities were not forged only by de-facto solidarity but as much, if not more, by "common systems of representation, an identity and shared images of the world with their symbols and mythology. Yet Europe is devoid of mythology."
In Europe, Lamy said, despite the "much tighter-knit relationships than elsewhere on the international level and very strong European homogeneity on values […] there is also an incredible ignorance on the part of European peoples of other European peoples." This lack of knowledge, with all its clichés and prejudices, has been reflected in the rather tense dialogue between German and Greek politicians and media over the sovereign debt crisis.
In over half a century of building Europe, very little has been done to improve this situation, Lamy noted. While the Erasmus programme, which allows European Union students to study in other member states, has been highly successful, the idea of writing a Franco-German history text book put forward by Delors at the end of the 1980s was put on the back burner and not resuscitated until 2003. The book was finally published three years later.
And when it came to designing banknotes for the single currency, Europe’s leaders were unable to agree on picking a handful of major figures from their common history to adorn euro notes. Even the debate on the reference to the Christian religion in the draft treaty for the European constitution was "distorted by an ideological approach," Lamy said.
'Europe must stop limping and get running'
For Lamy, the crisis has also revealed the failures of European political governance; "We cannot carry on limping when we need to be able to run." He believes it is time to go back to basics in building Europe. "In Europe the anthropolitical matrix is a parliamentary one. The Council of Europe [grouping EU heads of state] is the upper house, the Senate. The European Parliament is the chamber of the people. And the Commission is the government."
The French have always found it hard to accept this structure because it does not reflect the way French political institutions are organised, he added.
Now, he said, the Council of Europe wants to act like a government and the European Commission has lost the monopoly of initiative it is supposed to exercise to represent the general interest of Europeans. And both the Commission, with commissioners from each of the 27 member states, and the European Parliament, seem to be bogged down by national considerations.
This trend was actively promoted by certain governments that "wanted to gradually stifle the potential of the community method", Lamy said, but the small member states did not oppose it, although in the past they had rebelled against such attempts to concentrate power. "Where have the Benelux countries gone?" he asked.
Despite these errors, some institutional choices that were ahead of public opinion and "a major leadership problem" in a world where international cooperation is increasingly important, Lamy believes Europeans will recognise that they need to plough on with European integration.
But the French presidential election campaign shows how hard it is to avoid caricature or demagogy when dealing with anthropolitical issues, he said. "Anthropological inquiry is very long term. In addition, anthropology is a rigorous science, rebellious of generalisations."
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)